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Billionaire investor Jim Mellon, the Burnbrae Group chairman who bristles at being described as the British Warren Buffett BRK.A, +1.63% shared his Buffett-esque aversion to two major technology stocks in a recent interview on CNBC.
Specifically, Google GOOG, +2.88% and Facebook FB, +3.95% are “fatted calves... ripe for the plucking by governments everywhere,” he said, adding that they will be “pillaged” by administrations around the world.
Mellon explained that they are facing “enormous” fines that will probably be “bigger than those being levied on the banks in the last decade or so.”
Facebook investors, he pointed out, are especially vulnerable at this point.
“We’re going to see decimation of particularly Facebook,” he told CNBC on Wednesday. “If I was Mr. Zuckerberg, I’d be looking at a halving of my share price in the next couple of years, basically.”
At last check, Facebook shares were up 4% at $159.04, taking part in a Thursday rally that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +1.13% and the S&P 500 index SPX, +1.10% both gain more than 1%.
“The Cambridge Analytica thing’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Mellon said, describing the crisis as a “trivial use of modern technology and one that’s rather sinister.”
Watch the interview: